A database is a structured collection of various types of records or data. For example, names in structured data collections are often mixed as to type—e.g., both business names and personal names may be included in the same data collection, with no indication of the type (e.g., “business” or “personal”) associated with each entry. Name search strategies for record retrieval are generally more effective when the search strategies are specifically adapted to a specific type of name (e.g., a business-specific strategy for business names, or a personal name-specific strategy for personal names). However, automatically making a distinction between various types of names in structured databases is complicated by the lack of surrounding context—i.e., only the name itself is available as input to the decision process.